Raining trouble

Posted on October 23, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

When it rains, it pours has never been truer than it is now for India.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj in Moscow to prepare the ground for Prime Minister Modi’s state visit in November, got a proper, if cold, reception. Her defining Russia as India’s closest friend did little to temper the message that, according to sources, was conveyed by Kremlin that Delhi’s taking Russia for granted will hereafter come at a cost. Swaraj was told, for instance, that unlike his other tours, the Indian PM while in Russia can expect no frills and hoopla — just business-like meetings shorn of all ceremony. Secondly, that while Moscow was, by and large, attentive in the past to Indian security concerns, it cannot afford India a veto on arms supplies to Pakistan — starting with the sale of attack helicopters and MiG-35 combat aircraft. Thirdly, depending on how things progress or don’t, Russia’s participation in sensitive strategic DRDO and DAE projects will be re-thought, as will the offer on the table for a while of the second Akula-II class SSN, the Iribis, that Moscow had agreed to upgrade to Akula-III standard before leasing it to the Indian Navy.

Given its own leanings, the BJP regime is thoughtlessly pandering to the Indian military’s institutional tilt and desire towards Western armaments and, hence, Western arms suppliers, without calculating the strategic costs to the country of going over so completely to the other side, as it were, simply boggles the mind. If Modi really believes that the US and Western European states will happily insert themselves in technology-transfer and indigenous tech-development role that Russia had heretofore specialized in, he has a rethink coming sooner than he believes. In the interim, until that light switches on, an awful lot of goodwill and policy ground for foreign and military policy maneuver will have been lost.

It is providential, in fact, that Pak PM Nawaz Sharif’s trip to Washington has happened at the same time as Swaraj’s to Moscow. It points to precisely the problems India, loosening its links to Russia, will face in dealing with a US now confident that Delhi has nowhere else to go.

Consider the ‘2015 Joint Statement By President Barack Obama And Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’ dated Oct 22, 2015 (accessible at
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/10/22/2015-joint-statement-president-barack-obama-and-prime-minister-nawaz) at the end of Nawaz Sharif’s parleys with Obama in Washington. The US Government has acquiesced in describing Pakistan “as one of the largest Muslim democracies [that is utilizing] its influence in support of peace, security, development, human rights across the world” and the US-Pak relationship as “enduring”, and “bilateral defense cooperation” as “robust”. While recognizing Pakistan’s role, albeit inferentially, in containing terrorism by referring to “Pakistan’s positive efforts to counter improvised explosive devices” — THERE WAS NOT A HINT ANYWHERE OF TERRORIST OUTFITS TARGETING INDIA, SUCH AS LeT LED BY THE ABOMINABLE HAFIZ SAYEED, NURSED BY PAKISTANI AGENCIES AND OPERATING OUT OF PAKISTANI TERRITORY.

In the most telling portion of the Nawaz-Obama. Statement, under the sub-section “Strategic Stability, Nuclear Security, and Nonproliferation”, the two leaders “acknowledged the importance of regional balance and stability in South Asia” and, in an obvious dig against India, talked of the need for “uninterrupted dialogue in support of peaceful resolution of all outstanding disputes.”

Worse still from the Indian national interest perspective, the US kept its options to assist Pakistan militarily and otherwise keep its hand hot in South Asian affairs. In this respect, the Statement, most significantly, recognizes “the importance of regional balance and strategic stability in South Asia”, thereby accepting the point Islamabad has always made that “regional balance” is what leads to “strategic stability” which construction, it turns out equates Pakistan with India, and is a license for America to assist and help Islamabad by whatever means to maintain a “regional balance” in the subcontinent. The transfer of the most advanced Harpoon antiship missiles, fast patrol craft able to launch durable motorized rubber dinghies for sneak attacks of the kind mounted by terrorists on Mumbai 26/11, and six F-16s is the down payment on this US line of advance. Incidentally, this merely amounts to reviving an old US policy but one that’s been kept alive by the Washington thinktanks, such as Henry L. Stimson Center, which has provided one of its senior staffers (Joshua White) to the Obama NSC, whose South Asia head is Peter Lavoy, a known Pakistan sympathizer and one of the Americans who early preached reconciling to a nuclear-armed Pakistan by plying it with American largesse!

Combine this considerable Pakistani political-diplomatic success with India being unmoored from its historical Russian military technology anchor, and one can see India heading for a strategic crash-landing. Tighten your seat belts!

Posted in arms exports, Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, Culture, Defence Industry, domestic politics, DRDO, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian democracy, Indian Navy, Indian Ocean, Indian Politics, Military Acquisitions, Missiles, nonproliferation, nuclear industry, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Relations with Russia, Russia, russian assistance, russian military, society, South Asia, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Technology transfer, Terrorism, United States, US., Weapons | 11 Comments

Letting a desperate Dassault off the hook

Posted on October 22, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

Today’s papers carried reports on 50% Rafale offsets amounting to $4.5 billion or Rs 30,000 crore (“Rafale deal:France agrees to meet 50% of contract’s worth in India’s related sectors” http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/rafale-deal-france-agrees-to-invest-50-of-contracts-worth-in-indias-related-sectors/articleshow/49487260.cms) — evidence that just the initial procurement cost of 36 of these so-called MMRCA is $9 billion as revealed in my preceding article in this blog dated Oct 19, with not an iota of tech-transfer, mind you.

The problem with the current indistinct offsets policy, and this is where the let-off is going to happen, is that what programs/projects to invest in and what indigenous capacity to build-up is left entirely to the French in this case to decide. In the past it has led to US defence companies writing off costs for “seminars and conferences” and the like against the offsets obligations. This offsets provision has not been tightened and Paris will feel free, for example, to consider its 5%-10% equity, via DCNS, in the Pipavav Shipyard, and similar extraneous expenditures as part of the Rafale offsets! It is — Heads French win, tails India loses!

The 50% offsets should be on the recurring expenditures on servicing and support for the lifetime of the aircraft $21 billion — minus upgrade costs — not on the $9 billion, meaning, fully $10.5 billion or Rs 75,000 crore should be extracted from Dassault as verifiable investment specifically in the aerospace sector programmes designated by DRDO. Otherwise the whole deal will be a dead loss. Recall that China got the whole production line and technology from McConnell-Douglas as a predicate for buying 100 of the latter’s medium range transporters in the 1980s — which seeded the aviation industry in China. But then Beijing knows where Chinese interests lie, and will move heaven and earth to protect and advance them. Delhi is in the business of enriching other countries at the expense of India!

All high-value armament deals are tense, nail-biting, poker games, except GOI invariably plays them as the perennial ingenue and amateur would — extracting nothing in exchange, in effect make one-sided transaction benefiting foreign states. Rafale as combat aircraft is no great shakes — it cannot even match the Su-30MKI in service with IAF for a decade. India should insist on Dassault transferring the entire production line along with the ancillary aerospace industrial capability as condition for buying this oldish plane. There’s still time because until the contract is signed GOI is in the driver’s seat — as I have written elsewhere; once it is signed Dassault will gain upper hand, and India can go cry in its cups.

Def Min Parrikar who is proving himself a weak and confused leader obviously cannot publicly over-turn PM Narendra Modi’s plainly quixotic announcement of the 36 Rafales-buy. But he can still ensure the demise of the Rafale deal by insisting that either India gets virtually the entire Dassault store to take the Rafale off France’s hands, or the PM goes over his head and the Cabinet’s in opposition to MOD’s advice, which Modi won’t do as he has enough political troubles which, incidentally, will only multiply once negative Bihar election results begin rolling in Nov 8. Then again, whether BJP wins or loses in Bihar, India is the big loser in the Rafale deal simply because the Modi govt won’t stand up for the national interest. And this is the way of a “nationalist” Indian government?!

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Grand ambitions, muddled planning

Posted on October 19, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

The impression created by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s meetings with western leaders is that India will buy any de-rated military goods offered. His announcement about purchasing 36 1980s-vintage French Rafale planes to meet the Indian Air Force’s requirement for ‘medium multi-role combat aircraft’ (MMRCA) wrong-footed defence minister Manohar Parrikar, who favoured the bigger, more versatile and economical Su-30 — superior to the Rafale in all roles, including nuclear delivery.

In the US, accords for more C-17 transport aircraft and helicopters — all, incidentally, stripped of sophisticated sensors and communications gear were signed. The HDW 214 diesel-electric submarine selection for the navy’s Project 75i featured in the talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel — except that the ‘214’ is an ‘export’ variant of the advanced ‘212’ and, hence, without features like the non-magnetic hull to render detection by magnetic anomaly detectors difficult.

Such defence transactions supposedly promote Modi’s ‘Make in India’ scheme. Not clear how, considering they resemble the old policy of licence-manufacture. Absent the hard decision to end arms dependency by marshalling resources nationally, scrapping the “L1”— lowest tender — system and similar impedimenta, and permitting the private sector to utilise the defence public sector facilities, New Delhi will continue to rescue slumping western defence industries, while preventing indigenous design-to-delivery capabilities from getting off the ground.

Rafale is also part of the anti-Russian tilt — justified in terms of the spares shortages endemic to its supply chain. Except, the 30-40% down-time of Su-30s and MiG-29s, for instance, is comparable to that of the Mirage 2000s, Jaguars, and Hawks in Indian employ. In any case, the problem with the spares is more easily mitigated than prospective grounding during crises of whole fleets should European suppliers, succumbing to US pressure, cut off the spares flow, as happened in the past.

India’s aim to win friends by promising big armament buys may win goodwill. But it lasts only until the next big defence deal is lost by a vendor state, when the squeeze is put with threats of arms transfers to Pakistan, as Russia is doing with the proposed sale of attack helicopters and MiG-35 combat planes to Islamabad.

Among the deals none is more outrageous as regards cost and disutility than the Rafale deal. The reported negotiated price of $9 billion for 36 Rafales and another $6 billion for mid-life upgrade — for a total of $15 billion — is being used by the IAF as a wedge to compel buys of 44 more Rafales. This amounts to $250 million per aircraft, roughly the price-tag of the US 5th generation F-35 fighter-bomber. Using Parrikar’s metric of three Su-30s for the price of one Rafale, the $9 billion will fetch IAF 108 Su-30s or almost seven squadrons (instead of two Rafale squadrons). Further, because this plane is produced by Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd., it will spur local production and provide a fillip to ‘Make in India’.

Then there’s an aspect relating to the life-time programme costing that has escaped attention. It involves a system of complex calculations the IAF and defence ministry ostensibly used to make the MMRCA decision. By this reckoning the cost calculus actually gets more skewed against the Rafale. The $15 billion up-front acquisition cost constitutes only 30% of the lifetime costs. Maintenance and servicing will account for the remaining 70% of programme expenditures.

It explains the fierce competition to sell fighter jets because a country once hooked keeps paying multiples of the procurement price. In the event, the realistic bill for just two Rafale squadrons is $27 billion with upgrade (at current value) without technology transfer. Is Parrikar aware of this, and the government prepared for a humongous outlay on meagre fighting assets?

IAF’s import orientation can be fixed by giving it the charge of, and making it responsible for, the indigenous Tejas programme — deliberately belittled by its brass. This, combined with the jettisoned import option, can produce startling results. Recall that import denial led to India getting world-class Agni missiles.

Consider a Rafale-less force-structure: 108 additional Su-30s — rated the best combat aircraft in the world which could, by 2020, augment the 14 squadrons of this plane already in service, along with squadrons of the upgraded Mirage 2000, MiG-29, and Jaguar. For short-and medium-range air defence, the bulk aircraft is obviously the home-made Tejas Mk-1A and Tejas Mk-II.

Equipped with an Active Electronically Scanned Array radar they will, like Rafale, be 4.5 generation, but more agile and cheaper to buy and upkeep, and seed a sustainable Indian aerospace industry. In single combat a Rafale can beat the Tejas, but a Tejas swarm can down a bunch of Rafales anytime; meaning quantity will prevail when the qualitative difference is marginal.

Moreover, with air warfare transitioning into an era of multi-purpose drones — something the “fighter jock”-driven IAF seems unprepared for — the Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft project with Russia becomes redundant. The savings of Rs 50,000 crore can, with China in mind, be invested in leasing extra Akula nuclear-powered attack submarines and the new Tu-160M2 strategic bomber India needs but the IAF, incomprehensibly, is allergic to, or in developing and fielding advanced drones, more nuclear-powered submarines, and multiple-nuclear warheaded long-range Agni missiles.
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Published in the Hindustan Times, Monday, Oct 19, 2015 under two titles — the print copy had “Grand ambitions, muddled planning”; the HT on the net had “India rescuing western defence firms, not developing domestic ones” accessible at http://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/india-rescuing-western-defence-firms-not-developing-domestic-manufacturing/story-v3doOxDUxqUMGNAVHwJjDK.html

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Going slow on Brahmos to Vietnam?

Posted on October 17, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

The more one hears of things happening in the Modi government the more dispirited one gets. After his meeting with Obama, who frowned upon the destabilizing aspects of India’s Brahmos supersonic cruise missile transfer to Vietnam, the prime minister, per sources has instructed MOD to slow down the process of delivering this indefensible missile to Hanoi. The fact that he didn’t outright cancel the deal is a consolation — however small. Modi’s pandering to the US has been mentioned by me in a recent past, but this is ridiculous. Instead of making life as difficult for China, GOI seems to be easing off on the pressure and that too on Washington’s say-so. The problem here is that Obama and Xi Jinping have for some time now been pussyfooting around the possibility of a two power concert running the world. Instead of doing every thing possible to undermine it — Modi thinks India’s greater good lies in being party to this arrangement. Nothing will more definitely shrink, in a practical sense, India’s strategic space and hinder its great power ambitions than being reduced to a cog in the mighty US-China machine. And yet this is the path Modi seems to have embarked on. This despite the most predictively obvious outcome of a Brahmos-armed Vietnam — of detering the powerful Chinese South Sea Fleet warships from even venturing outside its secure breakwater bases at Sanya on Hainan Island. No better antidote/counter can be conceived for the Chinese dreams of a “string of pearls” in the Indian Ocean basin. Now India stands to have Vietnam’s trust and confidence in Delhi erode. It remains to be seen if Hanoi will respond positively to China’s invitation to ASEAN navies to join PLAN in exercises in the disputed South China Sea waters, as a means of defusing the situation there. If Vietnam does accept Beijing’s gambit, it’ll be the first indication of its making peace with China on Chinese terms — a hideous consequence of India’s lily-livered strategic approach. India’s position is in no way recouped by its agreeing to having Japan join in the annual Malabar naval exercise with the US Navy. Meanwhile, the US is increasing its own political-military leverage in Hanoi by arming Vietnam, even if with less lethal armaments, the aim being to get Vietnam to rely on the US as security anchor while winning brownie points from Beijing for restraining Delhi from helping Vietnamese full-tilt.

The still more devastating irony to digest is that the Bharatiya Janata Party, which flashes its “nationalist” credentials, has been most responsible for rendering India vulnerable to Western depradations. Recall that it was the Vajpayee regime that stopped the open-ended nuclear testing with announcement of the “voluntary moratorium” in 1998 and followed it up, under Washington’s pressure, to scale back the country missile capabilities by diverting the effort of the Advanced Systems Laboratory, Hyderabad, from its ICBM development by insisting on prior development and fielding of the 700 km Agni-1 SRBM, when all Pakistani targets could be engaged with Prithvi missiles or firing the Agni 2 missiles at depressed trajectories. Manmohan Singh Congress regime only followed up with the absolutely destructive nuclear deal that has all but finished off India’s thermonuclear aspirations and, simultaneously,decapitated Bhabha’s 3-stage plan for energy self-sufficiency (natural uranium fueled reactors in the 1st stage, breeder reactors in the 2nd stage and thorium-fueled reactors in the 3rd stage) by siphoning off funds from the breeder and thorium reactor programmes to buying inordinately expensive imported reactors run on imported enriched uranium fuel. The opening for such denouement was provided by the BJP govt preparing the ground with the NSSP (Next Steps in the Strategic Partnership).

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Agni-4 test firing postponed ‘coz Modi in US

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

It is learnt that the fifth test-firing of the Agni-4 IRBM — and the second after induction as the land-based component of the Strategic Forces Command, that was long ago scheduled was cancelled/postponed by the BJP government because the firing date fell during the time Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in the US. This reflexive pandering to Washington on the one side and China on the other (by, for instance, conducting a joint Indian army-PLA exercise in Kunming at the same time as permitting Japanese warships to participate in the annual Malabar naval exercise with the US Navy, but disallowing the Australian Navy that too wanted to get in on this exercise) suggests that much of the early confidence about Modi standing up squarely for the national interest even if this meant stomping on toes, was a misread. Modi is turning out to be only a showier version of Manmohan Singh!

In any case, contrast the Modi regime’s genuflection to that of Iran under Hassan Rohani. It test-fired the Emad IRBM (apparently an extended-range Shahab-3) capable of carrying nuclear warheads knowing fully well it would be hauled up for defying the nuclear agreement with the US and a UN Security Council Resolution prohibiting the development of Iranian missiles capable of nuclear-ordnance delivery. The Iranian defence minister Hossein Dehghan preempted any criticism from the US and other Western quarters by saying “We don’t seek permission from anyone to strengthen our defence and missile capabilities.” No government in Delhi seems able to muster up such a refreshingly solid and straightforward stance of protecting the country’s sovereign imperatives? Any bets on which country — Iran or India — will be feared and respected by one and all?

Unless its foreign and military policies become disruptive and its attitude to international relations less risk-averse, and it relentlessly advances by any and all means the national interest by, for starters, initiating open-ended thermonuclear testing parallel with frequent test-launches of the Agni-5 IRBM, including the MIRV-ed variety, and the full-fledged Agni-6 ICBM, India, it is argued in my latest book — ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’ will remain an inconsequential, middling power, content with stifling Pakistan! The awful thing is our rulers seem quite satisfied with this reduced aspiration — a standing they misrepresent as ‘great power’.

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Belated Invite — Bangalore

Posted on October 8, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

Blog-readers in Bangalore are invited to an event at the Lecture Hall, National Institute for Advanced Studies (Indian Institute of Science campus) at 4 PM tomorrow (Friday, Oct 9) hosted jointly by NIAS and the Takshashila Institute. The event will lead off with the JRD Tata Professor at NIAS, Dr. Chandrashekhar and Nitin Pai, heading Takshashila, having a conversation with me on my new book published by Oxford University Press — ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’. It will be followed by an interactive session with the audience, which is expected to have many from the DPSUs and serving and retired military community. It should be an interesting session. Those among you in the Bangalore area, do please consider this a personal invite.

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Discussion — ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’, video

Posted on October 2, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

The panel discussion following the formal launch on Sep 24 of my new book — ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’ published by Oxford University Press, involving former minister in the Manmohan Singh cabinet and the only genuine intellectual in the Congress Party, Jairam Ramesh, ex-NSA Shivshankar Menon, Rear Admiral KR ‘Raja’Menon (Retd), former head of Net Assessment and Simulation in NSC and ACS (Ops), and Lt Gen SL Narasimhan, Commandant, Army War College, Mhow, is very revealing of where the problems lie. It is an interesting watch! The entire book launch event was videographed, is now uploaded to youtube.com and accessible at:

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Great Power: a ‘bridge too far’ for India?

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

Think of it. India was there when the Pharaohs ruled Egypt. It interacted with the Ancient Mesopotamian empires on the Tigris and the Euphrates. India was the mystery Alexander of Macedon set out to conquer. Indian spices and precious stones, finely woven cottons and silk, and peacocks, were the luxuries and the exotica craved by Imperial Rome in the age of the Caesers. Much of Southeast and offshore Asia had Hindu kingdoms, and absorbed Indic values and culture, even as Tibet, Central Asia, China, and Japan came under the thrall of Buddhism emanating from the subcontinent. The Ramayana lore so forms the cultural core of countries in this “Farther India” that the 800-year old Thai monarchy still has its historic capital of Ayuthhaya, an ancient form of Hinduism is still practised in Bali, Indonesia, and the adventures of the great Monkey King with mythical powers journeying to the “Western Kingdom” – India – remains the stuff of traditional stories dear to the people of China. So, India is and has always been a civilizational presence and cultural magnet. Alas, that is a far cry from being a great power in the modern age.

Except India, its civilizational imprint aside, has all the attributes of a great power. It has prime strategic location enabling domination of the Indian Ocean, supplanting the Atlantic Ocean as the most strategically important waterway. India’s peninsular landmass jutting out into the sea is, as many have noted, like the prow of an immense aircraft carrier, permitting Indian naval assets and land-based air forces to maintain a grip on the oceanic expanse and choke off adversary forces foraying into “the Indian lake” at the Malacca, Lumbok and Sunda Straits in the east and, in the west, the eastern ends of Hormuz and Suez, and prevent a land power such as China from accessing these proximal seas.

India has a burgeoning economy and the largest, most youthful workforce in the 18-35 age-group, promising the manpower to make India both a manufacturing powerhouse — the “workshop” to the world — and the richest, most extensive, consumer market. Further, the country has been a “brain bank” the world has long drawn on – an endless source of talented scientists, engineers and financial managers from institutions, such as IITs, IIMs, and IISC that are now global brands, helping India to emerge as a knowledge power (in information technology, pharmaceuticals, engineering research and development, and “frugal engineering”). India, moreover, is a stable if raucous democracy, and boasts of one of the largest, most apolitical, professional and “live fire”-blooded militaries anywhere. So, why isn’t India a great power yet?

India is bereft of national vision and self-confidence. It has the will to security but not the will to power. This is manifested in the absence of strategy, policies and plans to make India a great power. An over-bureaucratized and fragmented system of government unable to muster policy coherence and coordination hasn’t helped. The resulting incapacity to think and act big has led New Delhi to take the easy way out and emphasize soft power, when historically nations have become great by acquiring self-sufficiency in armaments and using military forces for strategic impact.

But the Indian Army, that during colonial times won an empire for the British and sustained a system of “distant defence,” with its ramparts extending seawards in the arc Simonstown-Hong Kong, and landwards from the Gulf, the Caspian Sea to the Central Asian khanates, has been reduced to border defence becoming in the process as stick-in-the-mud and passive-defensive minded as a strategically clueless government.

The irony is that an impoverished, resource-scarce, India of the 1950s, strode the international stage like a giant – leading the charge against colonialism, racism, and championing “general and complete disarmament”, assuming leadership of the Third World-qua-Nonaligned Movement, and emerging as the balancer between the super power blocs during Cold War. It was also the time Jawaharlal Nehru articulated an “Asian Monroe Doctrine” backed by Indian arms and, by way of classical realpolitik, seeded a nuclear weapons programme and a cutting edge aerospace industry that eventuated in the Marut HF-24, the first supersonic combat aircraft designed and produced outside of Europe and the US.

Just how far India has fallen off the great power map may be gauged by the fact that some 50 years after the Marut took to the skies the country is a conventional military dependency, relying on imported armaments and with its foreign policy hostage to the interests of the vendor states. And, far from imposing its will in Asia, New Delhi has become a pliant and pliable state, accommodating US interests (on nuclear non-proliferation, Iran, Afghanistan) one moment, adjusting to the demands of a belligerent China the next.

Far from earning great power status the old fashioned way by being disruptively proactive and, in Bismarck’s words, by “blood and steel”, the Indian government sees it as an entitlement, as recognition bestowed on the country by friendly big powers. Never mind that such position gained at the sufferance of other countries is reed-thin, as the recent move by a supposedly friendly US to join another friendly state Russia and China in opposing India’s entry into the UN security Council showed. The fact is India, albeit elephant-sized, remains a marginal power with a small footprint and, in real terms, commands little respect in the world. For such a recessive country, great power will always be “a bridge too far.”
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Published on the OUPblog September 30th 2015 at http://blog.oup.com/2015/09/great-power-a-bridge-too-far-for-india/

– See more at: http://blog.oup.com/2015/09/great-power-a-bridge-too-far-for-india/#sthash.1fvkDDVF.dpuf

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Leave it to the Generals

Posted on September 29, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

How is it that, with the advent of the Narendra Modi government, there has been so little substantive change in India’s foreign and military policies? The short answer is that political leaders don’t decide either the direction or content of policies; it is the “permanent secretariat”, comprising senior civil servants, diplomats,and the military brass, that configures policies according to its bureaucratic lights. That’s because the elected political leaders have little interest in these areas and no clear ideas or, as in the case of Modi, believe in an “empowered” bureaucracy to conduct the business of state. Hence, the implementers of policy in the Indian system by default end up shaping policy and its contents. This is particularly conspicuous in the national security sphere.

Deciding which country (China or Pakistan, for instance) constitutes the main threat is a manifestly political decision, as is the sort of war the armed services should prepare to fight — “limited aims, short duration” conflicts or “total war for victory” — which, in turn, will determine whether it is a “war of manoeuvre” that will be prosecuted or “war of annihilation”. This will require the military only to orient itself to the designated threat and alight on the appropriate plans to achieve the politically desired strategic aim. But this policymaking role has been expropriated by the armed services. It is an arrangement that is now sought to be formalised. Surprisingly, there’s no fuss about it.

The committee of experts headed by former Home Secretary Dhirendra Singh, appointed to suggest amendments to the Defence Procurement Procedure 2013, submitted its report on July 23. It tried sneakily to legitimate the authority of the armed services to configure defence policy. The intention to remove the political leadership from the defence policy loop is stated upfront.

In the first paragraph of its lead chapter, the report asserts “that whereas primacy has to be accorded to policymakers in strategic planning… the balance of advantage needs to shift to the armed forces in the matter of the choice of the characteristics of defence systems and equipment based on user preference and tactical and operational doctrines”. It doesn’t explain why this should be so. Further, “strategic planning” is dismissed as a mere accounting of “domestic compulsions (including resource allocations) and international relations”, and the “political executive” is turfed out of the business of defining and grading threats and imposing the parameters of war by subsuming these seminal tasks under the rubric, curiously, of military “modernisation”.

“Modernisation”, the report claims, “is not merely induction of new types of equipment, but a mix of strategy and security perceptions and optimum use of hardware to achieve stated national objectives” before affirming plainly that “Services should lead the initiative for modernisation”. This is hugely muddled thinking, considering that the process of perceiving threats and alighting on strategy is based on national vision. With no vision document from the government to guide the defence forces and this entire policy field ceded by the political masters to the military as its professional domain, it is little wonder that the entire security policy realm has been reduced to making hardware choices.

In the event, the government is supposed to merely meet the military’s needs already decided by the armed services. The report advises against disaggregated buys of equipment as financial resources may allow, recommending instead the purchase of armaments as a “total package” for full theatre-level warfighting capability, whether or not the country can afford it. In this respect, the document mentions not China, the principal challenge but, implicitly, the perennial punching bag, Pakistan, a “threat” that justifies the most capital-intensive, least-likely-to-be-used fighting assets: the massive armoured and mechanised forces constituting a powerful bureaucratic vested interest.

Such “total” packaging of acquisitions may not dent the Pakistan army in war, but the wrong military emphasis is guaranteed to leave the country vulnerable to China, and financially sink India. After rejecting the lead chapter of the report, only such parts of it ought to be accepted as relate to improving the defence procurement process and system — an ongoing national disaster.
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Published in the Indian Express, September 29, 2015; at
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/leave-it-to-the-generals/#sthash.4IUzJ9SN.dpuf

Posted in arms exports, Asian geopolitics, China, China military, civil-military relations, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Army, Indian Politics, SAARC, society, South Asia, Weapons | 8 Comments

N-“flashpoint” for 3rd party intervention

Posted on September 27, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

The nuclear “flashpoint” is the usual reason trotted out especially by Western thinktanks to gather willing Indian and Pakistani commentators and get the whole caboodle to endorse the official US, UK, or other view that to ward off a nuclear exchange, Western intervention is necessary. Most subcontinentals with variable knowledge of issues nuclear are easily roped in for the purpose because they crave invitations to such conclaves in the hope that these will lead to more such invitations and to short or long term attachments with the host and other participating institutions. Have never ever heard any of these South Asian invitees to do other than in various ways end up supporting the view that because Indians and Pakistanis cannot take care of the business of keeping themselves and their countries safe from rogues, hotheads, and similar variety of undesirables ostensibly populating the governments and the strategic forces commands in their home countries, or their inability generally to keep a cool head in crises, that well-meaning US government forays into peace-making and peace-keeping is in order. It is understandable why retired Pakistani generals and the like would stoke the idea of a pressure-cooker situation obtaining along the LOC — after all Islamabad has always sought such intervention as an antidote to certain annihilation in a nuclear exchange and, in any case, have desired international intervention in the Kashmir dispute. If the possibility of a Kashmir confrontation can get such attention, then damned if they don’t put light to that tinder. What isn’t clear is why Indian commentators seem so eager to buttress the case of an inherently unstable situation when, in reality, it is anything but, unless it is for aforementioned reasons.

As I have argued since 1987, in fact, the subcontinent has reached a meta-stable state in security relations, which cannot easily be disturbed. Unless the concerns of a really skewed exchange ratio — the extinction of Pakistan for a couple of Indian cities, notwithstanding, GHQ, Rawalpindi, is determined on national suicide. After all, the Pakistan Army has been nothing if not thoroughly professional particularly in gauging its own severe limitations and how far it can push India short of provoking it to deliver a fatal blow. This is the point I have made to Western and Pakistani audiences, and it is a telling one that has brooked little refutation. It is not a point welcomed, however, by thinktanks in America and Western Europe because it robs their governments of a line that accommodates a go-between/mediator role for the US, UK, et al, and the thintanks in question of a good part of their funding available to them by generating scenarios of prospective apocalypse that scares everybody to death. And, any promise to prevent it — including by such soirees — opens up the purse strings! In the event, herding a bunch of professional Indian seminar-ists with variable grip on deterrence reality, history, or even the national interest, is not difficult. They are relied upon to mouth stuff conforming to the laid down script. The still grander aim of such do’s is by slow degrees to build up a regional consensus to draw India fully into the nuclear nonproliferation treaty net. (This little disquisition is triggered by a newsreport of a conference on “limited nuclear war” hosted by the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory with grants for this exercise sourced to the US National Nuclear Security Administration.)

Isn’t it time an Indian government with some strategic wits about it hosted an international conference about the nuclear touch-trigger situation now obtaining in Europe and the imminence of a US-Russian nuclear war which, by the way, is a far greater possibility than a nuclear conflagration in South Asia? So if the US and Russia are not going to blow themselves up, neither are India and Pakistan.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, Indian Politics, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Pakistan nuclear forces, Russia, russian military, society, South Asia, Strategic Forces Command, Strategic Relations with the US & West, United States, US., Weapons, Western militaries | 6 Comments